The present invention relates to signal processing methods in barcode reading techniques, and more particularly, to a method for processing a digital signal obtained in a barcode reading operation in which a wavelet transformation is applied to the digital signal and a noise threshold is determined for each level of the wavelet transformation so as to filter wide band noise.
In a barcode reading operation, a laser light beam is projected from a barcode reader to a barcode, and light reflected from the barcode is received by a detector. An analogue signal is generated from the received reflected light which represents the information encoded in the barcode. After being processed in an analogue processing stage, the analogue signal is converted to a digital signal by an analogue-to-digital (A/D) converter for further processing and decoding. In the digital processing stage, usually one or more band-passing digital filters are used to reject noise in the signal. The similar is true for image based barcode reading such as CCD or CMOS barcode readers.
However, if there is wide band noise such as white noise, the noise in the signal band cannot be rejected by band-passing filters. The white noise may degrade the reading performance when the signal gain is small, e.g., if the barcode is located in a distance, or if the resolving power is low.
Therefore, there exists a need for a better method for processing barcode signals so as to eliminate or reduce wide band noise such as white noise.